VR headset unit sales to March, 2017:
- Sony: 915,000
- HTC: 420,000
- Oculus: 243,000
Will Facebook keep pouring money in, or pull the plug?
[1] https://haptic.al/latest-virtual-reality-headset-sales-so-fa...
He also committed to spending 3 Billion more on VR development over the 10 years!
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/mark-zuckerbe...
These numbers, if accurate, are prior to the massive price drops from this summer. There was a huge spike in sales, with Oculus struggling to keep up supply (it took a few weeks to actually get my own order).
Unless the numbers were an order of magnitude lower, I doubt Facebook would be pulling the plug any time soon.
I think this is a longterm space that Facebook is definitely not interested in missing out on, so they'll keep it going.
How much does it cost really, in the scheme of things? If anything, I don't know why Facebook simply doesn't ante up and steal some of the talent away from the competitors, they have the cash to do it and I'm sure people would be happy to work under Carmack.
To what end though? Say they could spend $10 million and quadruple the resolution, halve the price, and reduce the barf factor of a Rift v2 in a year. What then?
They would probably be better off funding a bunch of people to try to find something compelling to do with the current generation of hardware. It's cool for some types of games, but a market that's a subset of a subset isn't going to set the world on fire. It's easy to come up with a cool demo and hard to come up with a good application.
As a completely separate peripheral? Generally speaking most external peripherals sell to niche markets.
In the current form factor, I just can't see it moving beyond a gaming peripheral anytime soon and the market for that is limited. I was excited when Facebook got into this because appealing to everybody is what they do. But there's been nothing.
I'm starting to think VR is a dead end. There is a market for it, but maybe it's not very big.
It's clear that Oculus are spending a lot of money on research, and have recruited a lot of people. A key quote from the article is:
"I signed up to build a 30-50 person research team. Oops. Orders of magnitude matter."
So there's at least a few hundred people just in the research team, and probably a lot others in regular product engineering as well. I think it's clear Facebook are pouring a lot of money into Oculus.
Expect VR assets in the Facebook feed, and this to slowly bleed into AR items.
That's the thin end of the wedge for wider adoption.
Like what? I've been thinking about this and I'm having a hard time coming up with something that would get my relatives to buy a headset.
Full WebVR content will follow. They're easing the masses into VR via changes to the feed.
Oculus made it possible, and it's not working much -> that's unfair
HTC Vive has produced the best headset that made me, and many other, love VR. And they're not dominating the market, and they're not going to, and VR is not becoming this huge thing. It's the future really... I feel like that's unfair.